Twitter vision

Twitter’s exponentially growing video blog provides a massive, annotated library of objects, people, and animals, which computers can now learn to recognize.

Show a computer enough photos, and it’ll begin to recognize what it sees.

To make automated computers and robots capable of carrying out everyday tasks, they must be taught to see. Human babies learn to see by observing about a petabyte of visual data—about 100,000 ten-gigabyte thumb drives—in their first year, and now computers can do the same. Los Alamos scientists are tapping Twitter’s recently released, publicly available database of 6-second videos, called Vine, to provide computers with a sufficiently large visual training set.